After a long, cold, snowy, and dark winter, we finally started to get some record-breaking production out of our home solar energy system in April!

The cold, but sunny, days of early spring proved to be fertile ground for excellent solar power production.

Over the past month, we recorded our five most productive days for power generation since having solar panels installed last June!

When our system was installed, a representative from the company told me the panels worked most efficiently when it was cooler outside, and that I’d love seeing my production in the spring, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.

But I still find it amazing that our home solar energy system consistently generates more power during 13 hour days in April than it did last June and July when the days were 15 hours or longer!

Not that I’m complaining!

The end result of our burgeoning production in April was our first electric bill that was as low as our state’s regulations allow since last fall. Our electric bill for April fell 85% from a year ago!

While our system was sized to minimize our electric bill over the course of the entire year, since we didn’t have it installed until last June, we missed out on banking several months of credits during the spring to use over the winter. That meant we most likely had to pay higher electric bills over the past winter than we will in the future.

In addition to minimizing our electric bill for April, our robust production also allowed us to start banking solar energy credits we can use to offset our utility costs when our solar energy production declines later in the year.

In fact, we just banked the most credits we ever have in a single month. The $68.77 in solar energy credits we recorded in April were more than 37% higher than the $50.08 in credits we banked last August, putting our solar energy bank back in the black. Hopefully we are on track to head into the winter of 2018-2019 with enough credits to keep our electric bill at minimum levels throughout the entire year!

We’ve already had three days in May with higher production than we ever had last summer, so my expectation is we’ll have added a lot more credits into our solar energy bank for next winter by the next time we report on our solar panels!

How has your solar energy production been so far this spring?